Anthony Dean Griffey

We expect tenors to be heroic, their virile voices ringing. But not every such singer need be a Rodolfo or Radames, Siegfried or Lohengrin. Tenors can enjoy garlanded careers in more lyric repertory, and Anthony Dean Griffey is proving it. A native of High Point, N.C. -- population 105,000 -- Griffey, a boyish-looking 41, is as American as sweet corn or peach cobbler, with a voice just as toothsome: light in timbre yet focused, sturdy and suffused with warmth.

We expect tenors to be heroic, their virile voices ringing. But not every such singer need be a Rodolfo or Radames, Siegfried or Lohengrin. Tenors can enjoy garlanded careers in more lyric repertory, and Anthony Dean Griffey is proving it. A native of High Point, N.C. -- population 105,000 -- Griffey, a boyish-looking 41, is as American as sweet corn or peach cobbler, with a voice just as toothsome: light in timbre yet focused, sturdy and suffused with warmth.

In the underground warren of the New York State Theater, where New York City Opera has its burrows, a pillowy, looming man in a baseball cap and a baggy T-shirt trundles into a windowless, fluorescent-lit room. It's the sort of blank, dilapidated place that, except for the battered piano in the corner and the bits of colored tape on the floor, could be a waiting area at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In the underground warren of the New York State Theater, where New York City Opera has its burrows, a pillowy, looming man in a baseball cap and a baggy T-shirt trundles into a windowless, fluorescent-lit room. It's the sort of blank, dilapidated place that, except for the battered piano in the corner and the bits of colored tape on the floor, could be a waiting area at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The next Metropolitan Opera production to get a live telecast in movie theaters will be Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes" at 10:30 a.m. on March 15. Anthony Dean Griffey will sing the title role. Patricia Racette will be Ellen Orford. The production will be directed by Tony Award-winner John Doyle. Donald Runnicles will conduct. Among the local theaters showing the opera will be the Burbank 16, the Bridge in Los Angeles and the Irvine Spectrum 21. A complete list of presenting theater loca- tions can be found at www.FathomEvents.

The Metropolitan Opera is getting back into the DVD business. Five of the Met's eight live high-definition movie-theater broadcasts next season will be released on DVD by EMI Classics, the companies said. The releases include Puccini's "Manon Lescaut" with Karita Mattila, Marcello Giordani and conductor James Levine; and Verdi's "Macbeth," with Levine conducting Lado Ataneli in the title role. It has been six years since the Met last recorded an opera that was released on DVD.

Here is a list of Grammy winners in the major categories, as announced Sunday by the Recording Academy. For a complete list of winners, go to TheEnvelope.com.

To whatever operatic niche Andre Previn and Philip Littell's handsome, regularly gripping setting of "A Streetcar Named Desire" is finally relegated--hit, miss, succes d'estime or noble failure--one thing was clear when San Diego Opera opened its production Saturday night in Civic Theatre: It satisfies an audience, at least this often discerning audience. And it gives its cast of singing actors abundant opportunities to display their polished skills.

Contrary to the belief of just about every music director on the planet, Beethoven's 70-minute Ninth Symphony is neither too short nor too one-dimensional to stand alone. But if it must have a prelude, Schoenberg's "A Survivor From Warsaw" may be the perfect companion. Or so Esa-Pekka Salonen suggested, opening the Los Angeles Philharmonic's subscription season at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Friday with that unusual, if not unprecedented, pairing.

Tonight, an audience will shove through a narrow, rickety walkway under ratty scaffolding to witness Lorin Maazel raise the roof at Avery Fisher Hall. For his last concert as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Maazel will conduct Mahler's massive Symphony No. 8, written to accommodate 1,000 performers and performed here with a still-impressive 351 musicians, choristers and vocal soloists. That Maazel will sonically raise the roof I have no doubt, because that is what he did Thursday night in the second of the run of four performances of Mahler's setting of the end of Goethe's "Faust," possibly music's most impressive representation of heavenly ascent.

7:30pm Theater In Patrick Stewart's solo show "Uneasy Lies the Head," the actor brings to life kings and emperors, generals and prime ministers. The former Starship Enterprise captain is performing the show as a benefit for the Lobero Theatre Foundation and the Shakespeare School. * "Uneasy Lies the Head," Lobero Theatre, 33 E. Canon Perdido St., Santa Barbara. Friday, 7:30 p.m. $40 to $100. (805) 963-0761.

For his first season as music director of Los Angeles Opera, James Conlon has conducted four productions, three of them new. But that has hardly been enough for him. He also initiated a special staging of Benjamin Britten's miracle play, "Noye's Fludde," at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. And Wednesday night he put together a special introduction to what he plans as the company's multi-year look at operas by composers the Nazis considered "degenerate" artists and wanted silenced.